Fictitious friend

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In discovering that the one that I've shared the last four years with is addicted to crack cocaine I've been forced to reevaluate our entire past.

How much has his addiction led him to be creative with how he spent his time. Has he evolved a self that has no body, no real place in space and time. A reservoir of excuses and extenuations?

Yep, for sure. As my dead best friend would've said “It makes my ass want a soda cracker.” I never knew what the rectal insertion of a saltine would do but it always seemed to sum up frustration magnificently.

One day he essayed his most effective but in retrospect stratagem: the friend that doesn't exist.

The guy that I live with is an incompetent liar. His falsehoods were usually discerned as he uttered them. He'd confess them before confronted so I accepted them. The ones I spotted served trivial purposes at best. We'd laugh together about how silly he'd been.

With Phoebe, who never has been, he created a masterstroke. He maintained the details of lifestyle, location, dead cardiologist husband, all the tiny bits that could've exploded in his face, flawlessly.

There was an email purportedly from her that I could tell he wrote. It wanted me to agree that he needed a certain therapy. Nothing material to be gained from that. And I told him that the syntax and diction were his.

His friend and I never met. I'm so asocial that is easier for me to believe than you. I never wanted to meet her. I was glad to know that he'd found a sympathetic ear.

Then the doubts set in

The internet is a gift to those of us who sometimes need to discover lies. If only negatively.

Checking Durham County's online records were all negative.

A professed liberal (Charles would never invent even a fictitious conservative pal): no voter record.

She owned her house: but no property record.

Two years of excuses, money he needed, places he'd been were turned into lies (for the prurient among you none of this leads to thrilling tales of sexual infidelity).

I'd been lied to (quite literally) thousands of times.

With this his entire past becomes a question. Do I know the person that I've been living with?